A new Japanese supercomputer
costing hundreds of millions of dollars was switched on this month and immediately
outclassed its nearest rival.

Before its launch, all of
the top six supercomputers in the world were in the US.

The new machine, called
the Earth Simulator, is five times as fast as the best of these and is being
used by the Japan Marine Science and Technology Centre to make predictions about
the future of the Earth's climate and its crust.

A German supercomputer expert
says it is likely to remain the world's fastest supercomputer for at least two
years.

Rivals outclassed

The previous record holder,
ASCI White at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in the US, was built by IBM
and is used to simulate nuclear weapons explosions.

The performance of giant
computers like these is judged by the number of floating point operations or
Flops - calculations involving non whole numbers - they can carry out every
second.

The Earth Simulator is capable
of 35 teraflops, or 35 million million calculations per second.

It trounces ASCI White's
7 teraflops but uses fewer processors.

Challenge for US

Hans Werner Meuer, founder
of the top 500 list of world supercomputers, says he expects the Earth Simulator
to outperform all of its nearest 19 rivals put together.

"The ES is a real challenge
for the US ASCI programme. The US labs are now falling significantly behind,"
he told the high performance computing news service Primeur.

The Earth Simulator was
built by NEC and achieves its extraordinary performance by using components
optimised for the particular problem it sets out to solve.

US manufacturers have tended
to concentrate on making machines which use high numbers of relatively cheap
components.

ASCI White has 8,192 processors,
while the Earth Simulator has only 5,104.

Design work on the Japanese
machine began in 1997 and it occupies a specially constructed new building which
takes up the size of four tennis courts.